Ava DuVernay (2016)
Ava DuVernay’s documentary takes its name from Amendment XIII to the US Constitution. The amendment outlawed slavery and ‘involuntary servitude’, ‘except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted …’ DuVernay’s thesis is that, since the end of the American Civil War, slavery has in effect been perpetuated through a succession of government practices and legislation. Her film, which runs 100 minutes, focuses at most length on the period since 1968, when Richard Nixon won the presidential election on a law and order platform. Through declaring a ‘war on drugs’ that disproportionately affected black and other minority communities, Nixon and his successors in the White House over the next thirty years oversaw huge and sustained increases in the incarceration of people of colour. This central chunk of 13th is sandwiched between, at the start, a summary description of post-Civil War racism (including images from D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation) and, in the closing stages, videos of police shootings of African Americans in the present decade.
13th is a bitterly outraged, emotionally powerful piece of work. How much of the power results from DuVernay’s technique and images, how much from the statistics she presents, is harder to say. The statistics would be appalling as a simple list of facts on a piece of paper and include the following. The USA is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The country’s total number of prisoners, around 327,000 in 1970, is now more than two million. Black men account for approximately 6.5% of the US population and 40.2% of the US prison population. One in every 17 American white males can expect to spend part of his life behind bars; the equivalent figure for American black males is one in three. Most of the many talking heads in 13th seem to talk at great speed, an effect reinforced by DuVernay’s rapid cutting between interviews. The soundtrack also includes plenty of urgent, furious rap. DuVernay likes to underline key phrases – whether spoken by interviewees or in song lyrics – by flashing them on the screen in bold, kinetic letters. Information and assertions come thick and fast: 13th is challenging to experience thanks partly to sheer sensory overload.
For this viewer, the most compelling witness was Angela Davis, past and present. DuVernay includes news film of the fiercely articulate political activist of the early 1970s. The seventy-four-year old Davis – now Professor Emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz – also features, speaking with a calmer, deeper anger. Not every contributor is liberal or left of centre: the conservatives in evidence include Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich (who at least admits the disparity in sentencing for offences relating to use of cocaine vs crack was unfair and ‘an enormous burden’ on the black community). But most of the views expressed are sympathetic to DuVernay’s arguments. I lack knowledge of the subject enough to have a clear sense of how much that’s said is disputable but I’d guess there are plenty of oversimplifications. (Someone says, for example, that Nixon, thanks to his law and order pitch, won the 1968 election ‘easily’. His margin of victory in the electoral college was certainly comfortable but the difference in the popular vote shares of Nixon and Hubert Humphrey was small – 43.4% to 42.7%.) Donald Trump is peerless at condemning himself out of his own mouth so it worries me when DuVernay accompanies some particularly vile words of his with images of white racist violence to which Trump’s rant doesn’t explicitly refer. But these are quibbles. The thrust of 13th is unarguable and its effect enraging.
22 May 2018
